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  3. Britain’s housing market is like food in a microwave, says Spencer Dale, the chief economist at the Bank of England. It can " tu

Britain’s housing market is like food in a microwave, says Spencer Dale, the chief economist at the Bank of England. It can " tu

admin2016-03-21  35
问题     Britain’s housing market is like food in a microwave, says Spencer Dale, the chief economist at the Bank of England. It can " turn from lukewarm to scalding hot in a matter of a few economic seconds". Since the crisis the bank has gained new tools to control the market’s temperature. Now that the heat is rising, it may soon start testing them out.
    Until last year house prices were rising predominantly in prosperous central London boroughs. That was largely because of an influx of cash-rich buyers, says Neal Hudson of Savills, an estate agency. People saw posh property in the capital as a shelter from economic turmoil abroad. Elsewhere in Britain, the housing market was slow. Potential buyers struggled to find mortgages. Falling real wages, economic uncertainty and the memory of declining house prices during the crisis curbed Britons’ passion with property.
    That changed in 2013. Prices rose by 6. 8% in the year to January, according to the Office for National Statistics. They are still increasing fastest in London—up 13.2% compared with last year— but the inflation has spread to outer boroughs. In Brent, an unfashionable part of north-west London, prices have risen 31% in a year, according to a report from Nationwide, a building society. It recorded substantial increases in every part of Britain.
    These higher prices are a problem for first-time buyers, but they are not yet unsustainable. Nationally, house prices remain 16% below their pre-crisis peak, adjusted for inflation. Prices are high relative to wages, but that is not surprising. Successive governments have failed to free enough land for new housing development, while preserving plenty of greenbelt. Borrowing costs have fallen over recent decades, in part because of a global excess of savings, making it easier for Britons to sustain large mortgages.
    Even so, the housing market is notoriously prone to bubbles. In January Mark Carney, the bank’s governor, warned MPs of the dangers of "inferred expectations"—people rushing to buy on the assumption that prices will continue to surge. Hints of that are visible. People increasingly think house prices will keep climbing. Even though the government’s "Help to Buy" schemes, which subsidise higher-risk mortgages, are probably having only a moderate direct impact, publicity surrounding them has fed a broader assurance that prices can only go up.
We can infer from the underlined sentence that housing market______.
选项 A、is not complicated at all
B、will be stable for a long time
C、will be completely controlled
D、is unpredictable and changeable
答案D
解析 文章首段首句指出“英国住房市场就像微波炉里的食物”；第二句又进一步说明“它可以在数秒内从微温变成滚烫”；可见住房市场变化很快。选项[A]“一点也不复杂”，[B]“会长期稳定”和[C]“将会完全被控制住”都是比较积极的意思，而原文却相对消极，故最佳答案为[D]“变化多端，难以预测”。
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